An release (album) in Helium is equal to an item in the Releases view. All releases are grouped using the Album tag and/or the path the files are located in. This can sometimes produce unexpected results, for example when you have two different Greatest Hits albums in the same folder or if the files of one album are located in more than one folder.
An example of an incorrectly grouped album is shown below:
Artist A has an album named Album A
Artist B also has an album named Album A
If these two albums are located in the same folder and are added to the library, Helium may not have enough information to be able to separate them since they have the same Album name. This album will be treated as a various artists album instead of an album from one single artist. You would need to manually correct this problem.
Another common example is the following:
A folder contains two sole tracks from different (album) artists but with the same album name, A.
When added to Helium's database only one album will be generated, A.
The reason for this is that Helium is as mentioned above, the album tags and the path where the tracks are located to identify unique albums and also to support albums with multiple CD's in sub-folders.
If in the above case each track should be treated as a unique release, be sure to place each track in a unique path. If the files are single-tracks, it might be better to treat the as a part of one big release, "single tracks" but still keep all artists unique.
To achive that you will need to modify the tags for the files in the same folder, to have the same album tag for example "single tracks". It is also recommended that you clear album artist in this case, otherwise the "single tracks" release would consist of multiple album artists.
Correcting incorrectly grouped tracks
There are two ways of correcting incorrectly grouped tracks:
- Move all tracks belonging to the same album to a new folder, for example a folder named after the artist name and album name.
- Change the album tag on one or both albums to make them different.
When you edit tags with the tag editors, Helium will try to automatically assign tracks to the correct album.
Note:
- Helium always uses the album tag and the folder to differentiate between two albums. If the path and album tag is the same the files will end up in the same album.
- Helium will also try to merge albums on more than one cd that is located in different folders, if the path only differs with a maximum of 2 characters and the characters are numbers between 1 and 99, then Helium will merge the folders into one album.
An example for this could be a multiple disc album like this:
C:\My Music\ArtistX\AlbumY\CD1\xx. Track.mp3
C:\My Music\ArtistX\AlbumY\CD1\....mp3
C:\My Music\ArtistX\AlbumY\CD2\xx. Track.mp3
C:\My Music\ArtistX\AlbumY\CD2\....mp3 - If you have followed the instructions above but albums are still incorrectly interpreted you can review the Album Sort Order tag to verify that it is identical on all tracks that you would like to be grouped together.
- Have a strategy for "single tracks" Either group them to one release as recommended above or be sure to have a folder structure strategy for them.